23 Harsh Truths Holding You Back | Unlock Your Full Potential | Jodie Cook

0:00Jodie Cook:If someone suspects that they are not fulfilling their full potential in some way, if they're going through their day or their week with friction, feeling like there's more to life than this, there's more to me than this, then they should definitely stay. How should they think about designing their dream life and achieving their goals and their dreams? The first step towards living your dream life is to... When I'm on my deathbed, what will I be wishing I did or what will I be wishing my life had in it? And then plan your dream life from there. What does that actually look like for you right now?

0:31Jodie Cook:I live in a new city every one to three months. I don't cook. I don't clean. I don't do chores. You do that seven days a week. You don't have a weekend. I feel like so much stuff is set up just to distract you. Oh, it's a Saturday. I can't possibly work today. Oh, it's Friday night. Who works on Friday night? You could just play this normal person record on repeat in your head and it wouldn't get you anywhere. We're just not taught to think for ourselves at all. We're taught to pass exams to a mark scheme and do the bare minimum to do that and then go and join a job and do the bare minimum to not get fired.

1:01Jodie Cook:It's calling bullshit on yourself again and saying what am I just believing on repeat which is controlling my thoughts, my words, my actions and is ultimately dictating this life that I'm just living on autopilot. Is another part of that forging new relationship? A real trap is falling into hanging out with people based on nostalgia because then you just meet up, you rehash old stories, you talk about the past, it's all about just what happened once and you're not progressing. Every time you have that story you're just reliving a past version of yourself the most valuable rewarding relationships are ones where you're what is a personal success system and how can i unlock mine everyone has a personal success system they just might not know it and how to find your business

1:47for someone who's just clicked on the title or thumbnail why should they stick around what what do you think they're going to gain from from this conversation if someone suspects that they are

1:58Jodie Cook:not fulfilling their full potential in some way if they're going through their day or their week with friction or kind of feeling like there's more to life than this there's more to me than this then they should definitely stay I've unbelievably been there and I figured it out and I've got frameworks and methods and stories to share that I'm looking forward to talking about awesome yeah that's pretty much why I got you on every time I listen to you I get so fired up and I want to call bullshit on myself and take action immediately and I always learn something and I know a lot of people who know you and they come to you and they just think of you whenever they feel this way they feel like they want to unlock their true potential and live this amazing life their dream life there's something I heard you say once it's so many of us are operating so far beneath our potential, we need to call bullshit on ourselves and stop doing all the things we're doing mediocrely or don't even enjoy so we can free up our time and just focus on the things we want to be world-class at.

3:02What do you think when you hear that?

3:04Jodie Cook:I believe that so much. So all of the stuff I write is pretty much advice to myself and the voice in my head is quite angry with myself when I believe my own bullshit. So it's always like, come on, Jodie, you've got this. You know what you want to do. Just do it. Get intentional. do stuff so that's like advice to myself that then I share out online and then the messages I get back are people saying oh my goodness it's like you're inside my head and it's like well I'm inside my head but it seems to help it definitely revs me up and gets me gets me into action and for context on you for anyone who doesn't know you let's talk about you a little bit what what are some of the things that you're you're well known for I started my own business when I was fresh out of university in a graduate scheme.

3:48Jodie Cook:I was 22 when I started it and then I built it to a team of 20 people and I had it for 10 years and then I sold it just after COVID. I very much ran that business like a lifestyle business but I went through a big struggle to get it to a lifestyle business and then went through another big struggle when we shrunk loads during COVID and then got very back involved, figured out how to grow it again and then was able to sell it and have a really good exit spent a couple of years thinking about what to do next in the meantime i have been writing as a senior contributor for forbes on ai on entrepreneurship um competing in powerlifting competing for gb and squat bench and deadlift and then more recently i started coach vox which is in a company that creates ai coaches and i do all that while being fully nomadic so i live out my suitcase and I changed location between one and three months at a time.

4:43Yeah and you forgot to say that you've published a couple of books as well.

4:46Jodie Cook:Yeah I've published a few books as well yeah the main one's called 10-year career I actually wrote 10-year career in three months and I wrote it when I was waiting for the sale of my agency to go through because we'd done all the stuff that we needed to do I'd done all my due diligence and we were just waiting for lawyers every morning I got up and I spent 90 minutes writing my book because I wanted to take all the lessons from 10 years of running an agency of building it to sell it and put them into a format that someone else could take and use as their kind of blueprint for how to do it as well.

5:17Yeah. When I listen to you speak, I just think like this is you're incredible. The amount of things that you've achieved, the amount of dreams and goals that you've fulfilled and also just the way you live your day to day life. it's really cool the way you travel nomadically the way you don't observe weekends which we'll get into um and how you spend your time and manage your time I think it's it's it's incredible for someone who's listening to this how how should they think about designing their their dream life and achieving their goals and their their dreams do you have a process or a way you like to think

5:52Jodie Cook:about it I think the first step towards living your dream life is to define what your dream life is I think part of this involves being very intentional about who you hang out with because there's something called mimetic desire which means the people that you hang out with you will subconsciously take on their beliefs and their wishes that for the future and if you hang out with a bunch of youtubers suddenly you're going to want your YouTube channel if you hang out with a bunch of consultants suddenly you're going to start doing keynotes and getting clients and it's like but you might not want any of that so I would probably have just a tiny period of time where you come away from everything.

6:26Jodie Cook:Don't listen to podcasts. Don't listen to, don't read books and just think, what do I want? When I'm like on my last, when I'm on my deathbed, what will I be wishing I did or what will I be wishing my life had in it? And then plan your dream life from there. And for me, it looked like an empty piece of paper, which all the best things start with. And it was a list of every day, every other day, every week, every two weeks, every month, every quarter, every year. You don't have to do all those increments, but do those. And then write down all the things that you want your dream life to have in it in those frequencies.

7:01Jodie Cook:And then after I'd done that, I costed it all out. So imagine I want to go for a fancy dinner every week, or I want to go to a new city every quarter, or I want to, whatever I want to do, I had it down. I think I had theme parks in there. I think I had go to a theme park every quarter. I definitely don't do that but the idea is that you cost it all out and then you look at it and you realize that your dream life the life of your dreams is probably not that expensive because so many of the best things in like it's really cringe but so many of the best things in life are actually free or do cost very little and then once you realize that you can make the plan to just living it no excuses just living it to get super practical what does that actually look like for you right now like in your day-to-day?

7:48Jodie Cook:Yeah so I train twice a day I do cardio each day I do weights every day I do focused work each day I love doing things like this so podcast interviews ones where I host as well I live in a new city every one to three months or every one to three days so I kind of my travel goes at the extremes it's either spend an extended period somewhere join the gym live like a local or spend like two or three days somewhere and live like a tourist and also I don't do anything that doesn't contribute towards my dream life so I don't cook I don't clean I don't do chores I don't do normal I don't have a tv yeah I hardly I don't watch the news I don't log on to I don't think I've ever been on BBC news on my laptop in my life and so it's just stuff where I'm very intentional about not doing them so that I can free up the space to live my dream life I've heard you talk about uh in the past how you across the day you have three things is it like obsession profession decompression yeah that's it nailed it nailed it yeah so yeah profession obsession decompression I just think about everything in my life fitting into one of those three categories so by profession I mean the work the work that you do and the work that only you can do so I don't want my the time I spend on my profession to be anything that my VA could do or anything that someone else in my team could do.

9:13Jodie Cook:The idea is that someone else is doing everything that's using their superpowers to let me use mine. Obsession is everything I do outside work that I don't do professionally, but I still take very seriously. So for me, that's powerlifting because I compete in powerlifting. So I'm always trying to get better at squat, bench and deadlift. And I'm always trying to stay in my weight category so I can always compete in a couple of months if I needed to. and then the cool thing about having a profession and having an obsession is that as long as you don't cross boundaries between them while I'm powerlifting all the stuff from my working day is just whirring around in my head processing and answers kind of arrive just out of nowhere because my brains had a chance to switch off to work I think if I didn't have an obsession I would just be working all the time and then I wouldn't get that still that stillness I wouldn't find answers I would just be kind of a busy fool and then so the obsessions as well is really fun but I never feel like I want to do that professionally I don't feel like I want to do my obsession professionally and then also when I'm doing my obsession I'm switched so far off to work like my phone is on airplane mode at all times and that's a really strong boundary there are so many people on the bench not getting any stronger because they're just on their phone as well and I'm always like, what are you doing?

10:36Jodie Cook:Imagine how strong you could be if you were just focused on this. And then decompression is just everything else. And that's mainly just relaxing, but obviously relaxing doesn't rhyme with profession and obsession. So we had to have a fancy word for this. And, um, for me, that is meditating, hanging out with friends, doing stuff where there's no, there's no metrics around it. So I'm not trying to tick off how much of a good tourist I'm being. I'm not trying to like gamify travel. I'm not trying to count or play a game with anything to do with switching off or relaxing. I'm just doing it. So I don't have, you know, that you can get like meditation apps where you keep up the street or you can gamify journaling.

11:18Jodie Cook:It's just no, it's just this is the time where none of that stuff matters. Do you do them every day? So like what's the kind of time split each day that you apply to them? Ah, so the morning will be probably about 90 minutes of deep work. then I do cardio for like 45 minutes then it'll be another couple hours of less deep work so if I'm having like interviews or um speaking with people in my team or more collaboration work then it'll be then and then I train again and then it might be maybe another hour of profession but very much the smaller stuff so I won't do any stupid little tasks earlier in the day you know that you know the stuff I know they're gonna take they're gonna take you five minutes but if you did it in the middle of your deep work session you would feel like an idiot because you have to task switch and then task switch back so there's probably an hour at the end of the day for that stuff and that's the stuff where I'm always working on can I give this to someone else can I give this to my VA that's the kind of task list that's up for grabs and then evenings are usually just decompression just hanging hanging out or going for food or something like that and you do that seven days a week you don't have a weekend I don't really so yeah we talked and we talked about this a little bit because we've just had a bank holiday and I was like huh you do the bank holiday thing and so part of this is because I think that I love being very intentional about my life and ignoring the stuff that's just going on elsewhere because I feel like so much stuff is set up just to distract you and if you wanted to you could be like oh it's valentine's day I need to do something for that oh it's back holiday I need to do something for that oh it's a saturday I can't possibly work today.

12:55Jodie Cook:Oh, it's Friday night. Who works on Friday night? Oh, it's, you could, you could just play this normal person record on repeat in your head and it wouldn't get you anywhere because you'd end up doing exactly the same stuff. So I have no problem with anyone taking the weekend off, but just make it intentional. Don't just do it because it's weekend. Cause it's like, what is, what even is a weekend? So in my head, it's called, I call it the perfect repeatable day. The idea that you have your dream day, that you could live on repeat if you wanted to and if you had to and if the idea of that fills you with dread as a kind of groundhog day type thing then it's not your dream day it's not your perfect repeatable day and I don't live it every single day but I would happily live it every single day and it's my default and also why it's useful is because I travel around with my husband and we also train together and so if every single day we were like hey what time do you want to go gym oh I don't know what time do you want to go or like what time do you want to eat or what are you doing right now like it's just a waste of life even having those conversations so we just have a default that we both know and we have we have quite separate schedules in the day but we kind of know what the other one is doing we know what we're doing and so we don't just need to waste time talking about admin we can talk about actually important stuff or stuff that's fun to talk about Yeah.

14:12Why do you think so many people have these kind of dreams, goals, aspirations, and they put them off? They think when I retire, I will spend every day doing these two, three things that I really enjoy. Or once a year, I will go on a nice holiday and enjoy the culture in a different country. Yeah. Why don't people kind of unlock their dream life and their dream day now? It's just normal.

14:42Jodie Cook:You think we went through, if you went through the British education system or any country's education system, there is a certain path that is expected of you. And for probably both of us, it was you do your exams, you go to university, you don't really question if you're going to go to university or not, you just go. and then after that I remember even though I did a business management degree we weren't all going into managing businesses we were all applying for graduate schemes and it was like which graduate scheme can we get and then it was which job at a consultancy can we get and it's just you go the normal path and if you're choosing something different you have to find out a way of doing it for your own there's not like a program for you probably not some some places do have that stuff but you probably have to have to do it on your own and we're just not taught to think for ourselves at all.

15:31Jodie Cook:We're taught to pass exams to a mark scheme and do the bare minimum to do that and then go and join a job and do the bare minimum to not get fired. And then that's just how we think. So it has to be something. And if I think friends who have paved their own way a little bit more, maybe started their own business and they lived their dream life, one thing they've had is a role model. So it might be a parent who's just encouraged them to think differently, or maybe they had some kind of maybe maybe some kind of traumatic experience or maybe some kind of experience that just made them go hang on something's got to change here and then they've been more intentional about it but I think often if you don't have that thing you just will go along with what everyone else is doing and I guess it's a process as well of like bit by bit taking back control or thinking for yourself I mean are there any like questions that you ask or ways that you help yourself think like this yeah I do a lot of journaling and I guess I think for every every answer you're looking for there is a question that retrieves it and some of the big questions I love asking myself and journaling on are what do I know for sure because that gets away from all the emotion all the speculative stuff and it's just like what is my truth and then I love what would this look like if it would be if it was easy so that you can just think it doesn't have to be hard we think that we have to struggle through we think oh if it's too good to be true it probably is but it's just not true you can just you can live your dream life and you can use all your own ace cards in getting to that place and then what am I afraid of is a really good question because there's something and people think they're fit they're afraid of failure but so many people are actually scared of success and so it's it's calling bullshit on yourself again and saying what am I just believing on repeat which is controlling my my thoughts my words my actions and is ultimately dictating this life that I'm just living on autopilot without being intentional about it that's a big question isn't it as well because a lot of the time someone's got something quite good or they feel like it's good and they feel like there could be a brighter future or something that could be potentially better but you risk giving up what you've currently got yeah and equally as you say you might actually just be afraid of success um I've heard you say something before jump and the net will appear yeah is that like how you think about yeah I think if you're thinking about an alternative reality that probably means that your current reality is not a 10 out of 10 and I only want to live 10 out of 10 I only want to I want to wake up every day and just be so pumped for that day I'm about to live every single day.

18:14Jodie Cook:So if you're waking up to a day of sixes and sevens, there are tens out there that aren't finding you because the space is taken. So I had this the most in between businesses because I just sold my agency. I knew that I wanted to do something next, but I knew that I didn't just want to go into any old idea because I'm quite a, like once I've got a goal, I'll just go and go and go. And I did not want to go and go and go on the wrong thing. So it was about creating the space, not buying domain names, whatever it was to clear the, to kind of clear the way for the right thing to appear was the thing that was right for me.

18:49Jodie Cook:And the thing that is often right for anyone who's thinking, how do I, how do I swap this out? Like you'd be better off stopping all the stuff that you don't want to do and just being like, I'm okay with the space. I'm fine to just sit in the stillness and the right stuff will find me when I just start experimenting and seeing what's possible. how do you think about achieving your goals once you have found what you're excited about and what you really want to do next I think that it's actually really boring I think achieving your goals is really boring because I think the hardest thing is choosing what they're going to be yeah and making sure that they're things that do actually excite you and not things that are just on your list that you don't care about every time I speak to someone about this they always have learning Spanish as one of their goals.

19:33Yeah.

19:34Jodie Cook:Everyone wants to learn Spanish, but no one actually wants to learn Spanish. It's like, if you really wanted to go learn Spanish, you would go to Spain, you would book courses, you would get tutors, you would get books, you would meet Spanish people. You would be intentional about this. Like you don't want this. You're not taking action towards it. Take it off your goal list. So I wonder if the first thing to do is just go through your goal list and think, what do I really care about? If I, if I died without learning Spanish would it really matter and if the answer to that is no it wouldn't then it shouldn't be on the list and then I think the part that's really boring is just the fact that you need to keep going with whatever you're doing for a very very long time and I think that that's the point where you need to fall in love with the process and not the goal because the goal might never happen but it needs to be you kind of need to be okay with the goal never coming true because you will have really enjoyed yourself making the goal come true it's almost like just the effort is the reward so I kind of feel like that about my normal days if I never hit any of my future goals ever but I lived the life I'm living now trying to achieve them that that would be all right and is that is your normal life challenging like is it is it is it hard one thing when I hear this I'm like that's it all sounds amazing but um say you are on a path and it it's hard right and you had to have a tough day or you have a shitty meeting yep and you mark it four out of ten did not enjoy yep is that just part of the process yeah and you're still on the right track and you should keep going or is that a sign of actually I'm not having my dream day anymore and therefore I need to course correct drop everything and start again yeah nice good question yes it's hard of course it's hard um but a few things are that firstly I had this especially when I was running my agency I was constantly putting out fires because you'll know with an agency clients come they go team members sometimes they're great sometimes they're not so great all that happens but my goal was just that I was putting out bigger fires I don't want to put out the same fire again And I quite enjoy putting out the fire, studying it, learning how I put out the fire, telling someone else how to put out the fire, and then they put it out the next time.

21:51Jodie Cook:And then that's a form of progress that keeps the momentum going, that keeps me excited about it. I think if you were putting out the same fires on repeat, no, that would be terrible. And then you have to find some way of progressing yourself in your own business because you probably have a plan for your team. Everyone in your team, they've got their progression plan. they know what they do to hit the next level but where's yours and you need to be intentional about it yourself in order for you to keep going through the hard times and then the other thing I really like doing is just finding the edge of my comfort zone and then studying it I have this the most on echo bike intervals like assault bike intervals because you get to that dark dark place where you're like oh here I am here's my comfort zone and then you you kind of you can you can almost separate from you and study it and then think okay so I'm really tired right now so what's my brain telling me oh interesting and you can you can become an observer of your life rather than the liver the the person who's living your life and then you then get better so I'm really excited and motivated by the idea that my comfort zone right now is like this but in the future all the stuff that I think is outside it is going to be inside it and that that keeps on going until eventually nothing nothing can touch you and then you reach new I don't know where you get to Oprah levels the the levels where the people that you really look up to are just hanging out naturally yeah that's a super nice way of framing it actually it's just thinking like are the challenges getting bigger and bigger yeah versus are they just the same challenges and you like you're coming up against them and you think you fixed them or you should have fixed them by now they're still coming but if they're bigger and better every time then that's a sign of progress in of itself.

23:36Jodie Cook:I think if you're also learning stuff and then you're teaching other people how to overcome those challenges that's a really rewarding part and so much of the stuff I create is all because I've done something cool and now I want to teach other people how to do that cool thing but it's not even I'm not even really thinking of it like teaching someone else how to do it I'm thinking about it as giving my former self guidance so it's like what's the book that Jodie three years ago wish she'd have read to take her to the next stage so then do that because then you find that you create things where other people feel like you're inside their head and then you get those feedback you get people like people just send me presents all the time because they're like you helped me so much with this thing I want to like I want to treat you to like a I don't know something and then I get things in my inbox from people who are like this has been so valuable to me that I need to like thank you for it and then that keeps you going again and that keeps you you almost feel like you're the person like in the jungle clearing the path away and then right creating the map so that other people can follow it and if you're that way inclined then it's so rewarding you almost like I never want to stop that you've just reminded me of something else you've talked about in the past which is I think is it Elon Musk's ex-wife she says something about entrepreneurship and like developing a bulletproof mindset yep justine musk said something it was in a quora forum it was in a thread there and someone had talked about what does it really take to be like elon musk or bill gates or whoever else and she said first she said extreme people get extreme results which is one of my rules for life that's on my website that i think about a lot and then she said you have to get good at dealing with a level of stress that would break most people because that's what she saw with Elon the whole time because when he's doing all the stuff he's doing running all these well running five or six multi-billion dollar companies and being the richest guy in the world and going to space and everything else he's not thinking oh this is a really tough day at work he's thinking how do I play this game differently and so I guess she's observed that she followed me on Instagram by the way that's cool that's very cool she followed me on Instagram I guess because that clip got shared quite a few times.

25:50Jodie Cook:And then, and it's just a really nice way of thinking about it. But the word stress is so interesting because I think the word stress gets used in such an unhelpful context. But I learned that the etymology of the word stress is that it comes from two origins. And one of them is the word distress. And one of them is the word eustress, like E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S. and so distress is like not ultimately a good thing because it's like something's distressing it's not good but you stress means that excited stress like that kind of I've got butterflies in my stomach I'm feeling like yes this is my jam I'm going in this direction and so whenever we hear stress we think distress but really whenever we hear stress we should think you stress because that's the drive and that's the stuff that we need to get us through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship that can actually all happen in the same day.

26:42Do you talk about personal success systems what is a personal success system and how can I unlock mine uh can we talk about yours

26:49Jodie Cook:yeah so everyone has a personal success system they just might not know it and how to find yours is to look back at everything that you have achieved that you are especially proud of and dissect it and think what were the exact steps that I took to help me get there different people have got such different steps in there a friend I talked to this about he realized that every time he wanted to solve some challenge. He threw a party and he invited his like cleverest friends and then he raised the challenge to all of them and then they helped him. So therefore he had all his smartest friends working on his project.

27:26Jodie Cook:He had a party that he enjoyed and he also had accountability to them. And then that was what led to some of his biggest breakthroughs and his biggest achievements another um chris my new podcast co-host he has his personal success system always starting by someone who he trusts saying to him oh you should do this and him being like no no that's a terrible idea but that's always the thing that leads to his biggest successes so mine i discovered after i sold my agency and then i realized that the way i wrote my book and got a book publisher followed the exact same process and it was set the intention it was break oh no it was it was set the intention it was talk to someone who's done it not to get their step by step but to get their belief system so to understand the beliefs that I would need to have in my head to make this possible and then it was split that task that thing that I want to do down into something I can spend 90 minutes a day on and then it was visualize it so before I sold my agency I wrote myself a pretend check with the amount I wanted to sell for the date I wanted to sell I wrote for one social media agency with no earn out to the perfect buyer and I signed it the perfect buyer and so it's visualize it and imagine it coming true almost in your whole body like when I wanted to publish it I was like I visualize this email coming through to say yes you've got the deal and here's your contract and it was like I felt it and then after that in the personal success system it's just keep going and that's the boring bit that's like the I don't know how long this is going to take yeah I've written the date on my pretend check but I don't know if it's actually going to happen by that point I have to be happy with it taking a long long time and then just keep going and that's the system I followed for everything so now I feel a bit like the future is kind of wrapped up because what I want to do is just a case of putting it into my personal success system what's yours it's a very good question I need to think about it I definitely think cold email like one cold email okay I think that that's that's been an inflection point for me several times yeah nice um so like the perfectly crafted one cold email that's got me like you know my first client my first podcast guest um bunch of other things in my life one good cold email okay all starts there um I feel like that and and I think um I think meeting meeting people having and having conversations that's yeah that's that's super powerful yeah um there'll be a system there'll be like a six-step process I'll send you I've got some chat to come up with how how your personal success system could go but then if cold emails in it and if meeting people's in it then I would use it just think about your goals that you've got right now and then think how can I use cold email more how can I meet more people around this and how can I get there faster because this just is your system but yeah once you know you can just do more of it yeah exactly a really important part of everything you've talked about is um addition versus subtraction how do you how do you think about that there is a bias called addition bias yeah so you know what it's involving and yeah it does mean that whenever something feels a bit out of kilter we feel a little bit like not quite ourselves or a bit like something needs to change we just look to what we can add and the worst example I heard of this was a friend who had seven VAs because every one that was full he just got another one and he never thought hang on why do i need seven vas what are they doing can i subtract something it was like no no we need to do more and we're probably all guilty of our own seven va situation in something we we had commitments we had obligations we had possessions we buy things but really it's just not the way the way is to subtract so i guess partly i think this can come naturally if you're nomadic or if you live out your suitcase because I have a one suitcase that I travel around with there are constraints because there's weight limits I try not to go over the weight limits on airlines because I want to have that constraint of that 23 kilos or whatever it is yeah so something always had to has to be subtracted before it gets added back in but it's the same with your schedule I think people kind of act like they're going to live forever and therefore they're just like yeah sure I'll help you move house it's like no you can get a removal van and then we can go for dinner instead or it's like yeah sure I'll um I don't know I'll go and pick up that parcel it's like get someone else to pick up your parcel and then you can just chill out instead and so I think that subtraction first before you add anything in helps you make the trade-offs that then mean that you can spend your time in the best way and the happiest way that fits in with what you who you actually want to be instead of just running errands it's normally errands if you're enjoying this conversation with Jodie I'm going to put all the frameworks that she talked about in my next newsletter you can get it at the link in the description well I mean you mentioned as well you don't cook right so how do you do that you do have like meal prep where you just eat out uh what's the what's the deal so we have a private chef I have a travel spreadsheet which is everywhere that me and my husband are gonna go it says on it when the trip's booked it says what gym we've joined and then friends from all over just come and visit because they just log on to the spreadsheet and then they and then they come and book their flights and sometimes it's a surprise so my va is also on that so when she sees a new city arriving there she does the meal prep research for me and then there's another spreadsheet everything's a spreadsheet she has another spreadsheet that's just meal prep and it's each tab is a different city she researches them she'll send me like she'll put them in order of which one she thinks are the best yeah and then she'll she will either order them or i'll order them but that's just done and that means that there's no cooking involved yeah but again it's just like you get that time back right you don't have to worry about going to supermarket get some food um cooking it all that yeah and also all the time that you put into training a VA just comes back to you again and again so I think it would be easy to say okay this is the process VA VA does it and then it's not quite right and you get back in and you fix it but I don't want to get back in and fix it I want to get back in and fix the process because then the next time the process happens it's like this this is right and then the first time she started helping us plan our lives she was planning restaurants and things because um my husband and I went traveling around New Zealand for five months a couple years ago and she planned out like the whole trip Airbnbs um driving distances between things where we got our hire car from and she also put restaurants in but she loves Italian restaurants and I don't really love Italian restaurants so all her suggestions are like Italian restaurants and I'm like maybe not so then rather than just be like oh that wasn't right I'll just go do it myself it was no hang on this is actually what I really like to eat and this is the kind of restaurant I look for and this is the this is the thing to look for on the google rating and this is the kind of thing to look for on the menu and it's not about not having variety it's just about having a certain standard that you uphold that you then never have to make too many decisions about because someone else is making those decisions for you I just love that in terms of getting your time back is having a VA probably like one of the number one things to do?

34:50Jodie Cook:Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I think there's always a use for a VA. You just have to be creative. I really like, well, I actually tell my VA does this. I'm like, what else can you do? And I kind of get her to quiz me on my life and what I'm doing so that she can suggest ways that she can get more involved because I want her to be kind of studying it to then add new stuff in. So I love that kind of ideas of what your VA can do. So what would she do for you? Which does? Meal prep, things like if you're flying into an airport, you don't want to hang out and get an Uber, someone should be there with a sign with your name on it to pick you up and put you in the car.

35:29Jodie Cook:And that will always be worth it, no matter how much more it costs than the Uber or the transfer or whatever. And then things like filling out forms. I don't want to fill out a form. Someone once described it as you get this condition called form fullatinitis when you fill out a form and I'm like I don't want form fullatinitis yeah and so get her to do that logging into stuff doing accounts stuff that's emails do you do emails no but I have a really good email system where cold emails that I get that aren't good just get completely screened out so they never so I don't get on the loops yeah um and I get a lot of emails because people are always pitching me yeah Forbes stuff and I say don't pitch me this is how you can get in my column this is how I can write about you but don't send me cold emails and so anyone that does I'm just like nope and then they and then they go so that helps with time saving quite a bit so I don't I don't need my VA in my emails but if I if I did then I would and then she also so I have the I have Jodi AI because through coach box we um coaches create the AI version of them and I have the AI version of me and she trains Jodi AI so when I have YouTube videos out And when I do podcast interviews, she'll put the transcripts there so that my AI is always up to date.

36:45Jodie Cook:And there's other random work stuff. But it's almost, I think the way you do this from scratch is look at your calendar, look at your diary, look at the stuff you're spending your time on. If you don't record that right now, just time track what you do each day, probably to the 10 minute increment. What did I spend the last 10 minutes doing? And then if you get a really good VA, you could show them that list. and then you could say how can you help me with this and then they will be proactive at coming up with the with the things that they could do and is the same true of your team I think I've I think I've heard you talk about before you know saying I'm only online on slack between this 30 minutes at 5 p.m each day yeah I think quite a lot about the psychological safety I create for my team because I'm a standard visionary founder who just can be all over the place and I'm always aware I don't want to put my crazy onto them so I try as much as possible to not give people urgency and that often involves giving them a lot of advance warning when I'm going to be online and when I'm not going to be online so things like this when we're booked for a couple of hours I'd be like I'm offline this afternoon or um or just like I'm out for this day and I try and tell them about that in advance but then really I don't want a team that need me so we I don't have any regular meetings booked in at all with anyone because the goal is we shouldn't need meetings because there should be stuff that just happens on repeat and the default is that it works and I pretty much learned that running a agency as a lifestyle business it was I want the default to be that we make money, the business grows, everything works.

38:28Jodie Cook:People know how to solve problems and put out fires. And the only stuff that reaches me is the stuff where someone's like, I've got this thing, I've thought about it. I've got these three options for what I could do, but I just want your opinion on which one I should do. Like, that's the conversation I want to have, not the, oh, what do you think about this? Or, cause it's like, you know, you know this, you know our vision, you know what we're doing, you know our ethos. I would give someone, I would rather give someone more trust to get it wrong and then have the conversation after than have a smaller conversation before that then takes us all out of flow.

39:04Yeah, because at that time you were, you were what, traveling for one month and then completely offline for that time or?

39:11Jodie Cook:So sometimes because of the time zone. One month every three months, was it? One month every three months. So from about year three of having my agency to year eight when COVID hit, I was traveling for one month in every three, going to different places. If I was in Australia, it was a 10 or 11 hour time difference from the UK. So there's very little you can do in normal working hours. So then there had to be systems in place to make it work. But the time it was tested the most was in 2015. I was in Toronto and I woke up to about six missed calls from my general manager, called her back and said, hey, everything all right?

39:50Jodie Cook:She said, no, not really. The office has been broken into. All our Macs have been stolen. And yeah, just letting you know. And I was like, oh, okay. So what do you need me to do? Like, do you need me to do anything? She's like, no, it's good. I've called the police. I spoke to the insurance company. I've gone to the Apple store to replace everything and the landlord is fixing the door so you're good I was like oh okay and I just got on with my day and it should have been such a stressful experience and it should have been the worst most admin riddled day ever but it was just I just went to a coffee shop and carried on with my normal day because she sawed it all out so you can give people enough processes and you can hire people and train them to be useful and allow them to be useful and then just get out there get out their way and they will surprise you was one of the things you did that you just had this like google sheet which just had every single possible process or question in it yeah and then like a document yeah so the biggest hurdle anyone would face if they were going away for a long period of time and they had a team in a physical location it probably would be different with a remote team because you can just be wherever but the thing you would feel or i felt was this sense of guilt at leaving people.

41:02Jodie Cook:And so when I had that sense of guilt at leaving people, I spoke to my core team members and said, what are you worried about here? Because they were a bit like, oh, you're going away, what's going to happen? And so they would say, okay, well, I'm worried about this thing. And I wrote it down. Okay, what else? Worried about this thing. Kept going with this list until there's about 20 things on there. And then together we talked through, if this happened, what would we do next? So then we had this list of all of these things that we would do and then probably the office getting broken into was actually one of them and then there you go they just followed the process the only thing we didn't have a process for was March 2020 oh yeah because no one's got no one had an SOP for that so we had we had one week where we lost 25 % of our clients in one go and there's no someone needs to tell me about that yeah so um that was the moment where I got way back involved it stopped being a lifestyle business it started being something that really needed saving but that was the that was the process that then led to turning it into something that was a lot bigger and then making the decision to sell it so it worked out in the end as well yeah which brings us nicely on to the different games that you can play how do you think about the kind of game that you're playing right now and the different different other games that you can play so I think there are four games that you can play in business and they are the lifestyle game, the performance game, the artist game and the build to sell game.